passinglurker

So with the preview of the new Making History parts by @RoverDude comes the most important thing to do after receiving a preview. It's time to give some critique and feedback. Now let me just open by saying this isn't a criticism of roverdude as a person he's an amazing driven developer and modder with a great work ethic, and morals that have encouraged shared assets and has only helped make the game more moddable. The point of this critique is to aid him in making the best parts he can for the KSP community that fit in best with the more recent additions to the part catalog such as the space plane parts. This is important because every new major body part that is added to the game that doesn't fit in like this would also need to replaced when the indefinitely postponed rocket revamp finally comes and it's feared that if there are too many parts that need to be replaced the revamp may never come. This Critique also refers to the Semi-official Part Overhaul mod by @Porkjet because it laid a great foundation of how rocket parts could be made consistent with the spaceplane parts while still preserving a distinct style for each manufacturer to allow easy identification in the part catalog. Finally this critique takes the form of the large preview image written over with notes, criticisms, and reference pictures to backup claims. So for the sake of not breaking the webpage on mobile with something super wide I've enclosed the image in the spoiler below.

Its either... A) April 1st somewhere or... B) RoverDude finally showed his true anti-porkjet colors betraying the faith we had in him to emulate the quality of the overhaul we all loved and as a result the revolution has finally begun comrade!

It should be pointed out that unlike exterior flood lights interior window illuminating lights don't actually cast light they simply glow in the dark without illuminating thier vicinity. As far as the game's code cares there is no light casting objects present in the pod and cabin models.

If you want the little interior cabin light to realistically drain juice then you better also suggest buffing the batteries to have realistic power densities cause right now they can't even make it a single orbit around kerbin for most tasks without help from solar power.

"Oil Drums"

Regex already covered most of what I would have said for a rebuttal but as for this comment here I will say I'm not expecting perfect or even my own preferences honestly, but trying to make sence of the inconsistencies in stock balance makes it clear stock balance is terribly half baked. You can't honestly crack the config files open and try to connect the dots and not see this. I may have my own ideas on how to fix this but at the end of the day I just want to see SQUAD put some damn effort into the actual core game play instead of always just trying to broaden their market of non-discerning customers with ports and localizations.

Size doesn't matter to twr and isp only raw thrust is constrained The mammoth also has integrated fuel tankage and for all we know some of it's bulk is purely aerodynamic so again size doesn't mean the vector can't be powerful I can tell you the reason. SQUAD CAN'T BALANCE. Career mode is sloppy they've been too busy tacking on new features and fixing all the bugs that makes they've never stopped to polish what they have. Any way SQUAD balance isn't worth putting on a podium. So you can't say SQUAD knew what they were doing when they made the 1.25m engines krap and that we all have to roll with that. Personally I think 1.25m (besides vector nerv and dart) should be put about on par with 2.5m (3.75m can remain awesome cause it's endgame content) As it stands now early game is a royal pain having to stack pancake tanks and bad gimbaless engines to the limit your control wheel can handle because they won't give us any other means of flight control.

It would be nice to have a counter balance when using only one drill, or an inline drill/mini ore tank combo part. anyway how about instead of massively inefficient why not just make it limited to producing monoprop?

Actually it's not the vector is just the 1.25m equivalent to the mammoth and the main sail with the price and tech tree placement to match. All of the other 1.25 engines besides the dart are just under powered by compassion scewing your judgment. That being said something that is early game has thrust vectoring and isn't made out of pig iron would be appreciated. Maybe give srb's 1 degree of gimbal? Real srb's gimbal after all just say it's liquid injection thrust vectoring if you don't want to animate the nozzles

Ion engines are a bit of a gimmick in ksp unlike real life they have enough thrust to land you on the mun because ksp can't handle the long/slow burn style of flying adding more/bigger ones will just make this more apparent. If you want to buff them the best thing to do is reduce the xenon tanks dry mass ratio and adjust some of the part and resource prices (it's arbitrary and not balanced making almost any other way to fly more affordable)

Who even started this old "mech jeb is cheating" myth? I doubt anyone even believes it anymore

Yes being able to enter and exit from any hatch (or other things that look like hatches) without having to shuffle the seats around would be a huge quality of life improvement I want this very much

Well color me Cautiously Optimistic. I'll probably buy in because I'm cool with the paradox studio's model of "buying DLC is like paying a subscription for us to develop the game more" but whether or not I buy what comes after is gonna come down to how balanced, polished, and play tested the new parts and missions are. I don't want to support the same unbalanced sloppiness that persists in the stock career mode. Also personal parachutes are like WAAAAAAY to useful to not be a general stock feature please reconsider, and integrate them as stock.

Except what you assembled probably masses more than an Antonov an-2 which is why the tiny cessna landing gear aren't working. If you say made upscaled versions of the gear through config file duplication/editing they would have more flexing room allowing the wheel code to handle the weight. What you are trying to do instead insisting that those tiny wheels support those heavy parts cause it "looks right" is not realistic

KSP's wheel code literally can't comprehend a wheel that does not flex the wheel code would have to be rewritten (again) Yes it is that big, and nothing is stopping people from adding more wheels to accommodate bigger planes cause there is no way in moho you're gonna get a single set of magic fixed gear that can support everything you put on top of them. Not with the current wheel code anyway. No you see this is what you think you made And this is what you actually made Bigger Heavier planes need bigger wheels that simple

We had a whole thread about this back during the big wheel fix you can't simply turn the flex off, it just won't work, the physics won't behave how you expect. Even in real life fixed wheels have flex its just in the tires not some hydraulic strut. Retractables have worked because they have more room to flex. Look this is simple even large fixed wheel planes in real life have larger wheels to take advantage of the tire's larger air cushion. You can't honestly expect tiny castor wheels to support a cesna so you can't expect little cessna wheels to support a big aircraft moving at takeoff and landing speeds either.

as I understand this it's a physics engine problem. The fixed gear just don't have enough headroom to bounce around and support a load of more than 3-5 tons (ymmv) your potential solutions are... A. Make squad hire @Shadowmage B. have scalable or at least bigger variations of the fixed gear for planes bigger than a cessna C. Just slap a warning label on the gear and tell users to "get gud" (not recommended)

Autopilot isn't happening because its highly controversial with twitchy reflex users, and difficult to implement. Pilot isp boost on the other hand isn't hard to implement and only makes RO users mad it seems if we accept you can't please everyone and in the absence of a complete better plan it remains the best option for improving the relevance of pilots. Actually I can make the fuel consumption better without changing the maneuver or practicing my Z/X key timings. I simply have the game cheat and create the illusion of autopilot by slightly altering my rate of fuel consumption when I meet the appropriate criteria in this case having a high level pilot at the flight stick. In the end the same result is achieved with this in between solution and no one's the wiser. No youuuuu go play something else Anyway mutual childish potshots aside I recognize it's scientifically wrong scientifically right is a programmable autopilot, n-body physics, a to scale model of our solar system etc etc... kerbal is touted for realism not because it's realistic (far from it in fact) but because it creates the illusion of realism. Pilots boosting isp (or negating a persistent penalty however you want to frame it) is just an extension of that illusionary behavior BZZZT! wrong you are getting KSP mixed up with RO Imposing inaccuracy can't be helped we already suffer an inaccuracy in having to manually pilot everything with minimal instrumentation unlike real life. My inaccuracy simply makes a preexisting inaccuracy more tolerable to play with. No I just don't want to play under RO's heavy thumb, but if you want math imagine that autopilot/practiced manual piloting with advanced instruments is X% less wasteful than than unpracticed manual piloting with simplified instruments. What the suggestion hopes to accomplish is counteract that waste without complicating the interface, developing auto pilot, or telling players to "get gud" cause I don't have confidence that squad will make those first two better approaches actually happen. Ok lets see your complete from scratch career mode overhaul plan then (that isn't just RO) I mean if someone can design and prove out a better plan or convince squad to scrap career mode and start over on it I'd be all over that but until then I'm pushing making the most of the mess we got.

They are not exact trajectories we pilot by guesstimate and eyeballs so there is a margin for gameplay elements to compensate for our own failings or the failings of the ui like the aim aim assist in a console shooter. The idea that you use less fuel when you have a skilled pilot in the seat is an example of an abstraction in this case is an abstract presentation of how the kerbal is doing a better job than you timing burns and such it's really not a hard concept to wrap your head around. and either way how does this stop you from playing how you want if you disagree? I'm sorry but it does makes sense I'm sorry this is so hard for you to grasp that it's just a game and therefore we aren't so constrained in the implementation of gameplay elements. The two burns are not identical one burn is better plotted, aimed, and timed but making an auto pilot is hard so the game would instead cheat and just give you a boost to make up for shoddy piloting if you put in the time and effort to level up you crew a totally fair trade off. Now what would you say is the very core of the game that this would corrupt? Is it not the freedom of exploration? The challenge of design? The commitment of time? How could saving a a few units of fuel with a 5 star pilot corrupt any of that?

yeah that's a totally fair assessment if you hate both. My beef is just that there isn't hypocritical treatment. I do stand by kerbal skill affecting stats because its already part of the game and therefore extending this to pilots would be a simpler fix for all the drama it would cause compared to a more total overhaul but I can respect alternatives when people put in the effort to prove out thier ideas. It just does make sense for a pilot to execute the player's commands more efficiently and thereby conserve fuel if the player put in the time to raise the pilot's skill level. Its simple gameplay if you put time in you get a boon out. Pilots of our real spacecraft don't pilot like that maybe but in kerbal we as player-pilots are essentially eyeballing it without mods. So in this case manual piloting skill matters and if you don't have skill of your own you should be able to leverage the kerbal's "skill" to compensate for your wastefulness. We could use my argument to say we should have autopilot, but it's a much more complex feature to add (we can't even get squad to give us better readouts at this rate) and potentially just as controversial (see mech jeb) so a stat boost offers the best value it doesn't cost the devs much time and it makes the fewest realism users cry while making the fun seekers happy. I'm not denying there are better ways to implement career from the ground up, but tossing around small disjointed ideas like you are is what got us here in the first place its exactly what squad did "here are some vague placeholder mechanisms and we'll mesh them together after release... whoops looks like it's time to move on with my career and the new guys are too busy localizing and pushing merch to give a damn oh well" if you want to argue "things would be so much better if we did something completely different" then you'd better have a whole plan to share from early game through mid game to end game otherwise we'd be better off just polishing what we already got.

Technically you can't say that cause we don't know the engine cycle kerbal's use nor the molecular composition of thier propellants. So making thrust is about as abstract as digging up ore. I'm not set on it being a bonus I'm just set on it not being written off as a penalty right off the bat either. The nature and magnitude of this mechanic can only be determined through a process of balancing and playtesting not by what ones immersive gut tells them. The important part to settle on is that kerbals can abstractly change the performance of the craft they are seated in based on thier skill level. Everything else should be up to the devs unless there is a player who wants to implement it as a mod and use it to experiment and crunch the hard numbers.

bad analogies aside it makes sense for one to derive a fuel efficiency bonus from a skilled kerbal vs. an unskilled kerbal or player. It gives an incentive to use and level up pilots otherwise they essentially become waste of space. EDIT: oh and we have rovers which the analogy totally works for so add more power efficient rover wheels to the list of pilot boons while we are at it.

you are either trolling me or you don't grasp how it makes absolutely no difference whether kerbals buff stats or negate penalties with levels. The point is if an engineer can abstractly change the performance of something so can pilots so the arguments against pilot based engine efficiency alterations are bunk

one could argue picking a high concentration landing site in the first place is an act of player skill (especially if sticking the landing on a slope) and that avoiding the need for smart or tricky landings by using an efficient engineer to compensate is an act of rpg skill. but anyway I just see it as hypocritical how the rabid "realism" users can accept how engineers abstractly refine more efficiently, but can't accept the pilots abstractly flying more efficiently.

Short Answer: No Long Answer: It's hard to add life support without it dominating the game play. I'd rather be exploring than managing logistics. Habitability mechanics on the other hand would be potentially interesting because it would give you the design challenge without the tedious resource management, but implementation is tricky to say the lest Short Answer: No Long Answer: This is a randomized element that could potentially ruin a mission a long time in the making during its late phases. Simply put weather physics could be ragequit inducing. that being said I don't mind visual elements and obstructions, clouds on jool, eve, and kerbin, foggy mists on minmus, dust on duna, lightning and rain on laythe. It would all make the game prettier and even if purely visual it could still potentially provide more mild challenges. Short Answer: Planets Yes, Galaxy No Long Answer: adding another gas giant system or going interstellar alone will give you more worlds to visit than you typically would in a single play through. Going intergalactic therefore seems excessive. Short Answer: NO Long Answer: HELL NO Longer Answer: As with weather physics this is another ragequit inducing idea I'm not payed a nasa salary so I'm not gonna put up with it.